Blog #32 – The End Of A Line

Sarah joined me at work today. Here help was definitely appreciated and welcome. There have been lots of logistics to arrange for our one-week camp and her experience in writing and public relations was invaluable. Since Sarah was on top of things at the office, I got to spend the day around town. It is amazing how long it takes to get around Maun. This village is ridiculously spread out and to imagine that people walk nearly everywhere is hard to believe. The spread is tens of kilometers easily.

The other most enjoyable factor of traveling around and meeting with different people is that no one makes appointments here. You simply just show up to their office or home. Hopefully they are there and you just wait until they can see you. The other option is just waiting when no one is there hoping they will show up. People will spend entire days just sitting in an office waiting to see someone. If Canadians are none to wait in lines compliantly, then Batswana have been grossly misrepresented. Instead of waiting I would just periodically check-in ever moment I got.

I started the day with a quick trip to the Maun Sports Complex – commonly referred to as the Stadium. This is the only real sports complex in Maun, but I was still qite impressed with it. The field was of good turf that was watered and maintained to compete with fields back home. There were professional running tracks, basketball courts, squash courts and more. I was touring the soccer facilities, planning the layout of the different activities and making sure the infrastructure and services we required were there. We had been able to get the stadium free of charge, however we did have to pay for the use of the lights – 400 pula per hour, which is ridiculously expensive for the cost of living here. It may be part of the reason that the vivacity of this village dies with the sunset.

After that it was all government officials, including transportation, the Rural Authority Council and the Ministry of Education. It is neat to work with all of these people, but they are ridiculously hard to get a hold of and even harder to pin down commitments with. The rest of the day went off with much excitement and Sarah and I spent the evening just relaxing, chatting and debating the simple meanings of our lives.

On Thursday morning Sarah headed off on an Mkoro boat safari, so I was going solo at work again. I was back to visiting schools today too – so that was nice. Today was the last private school – Matswane. This school seemed to be the hybrid between OIS and Leopotswe. It had a good diversity of students, and a healthly atmosphere. I really liked the headmaster at this school too. It was a school that was here to learn and have fun, but didn’t tolerate silliness.

In the evening Sarah and I decided that we would try our luck at cooking once again this time with chili and cookies! Except, once again we were late getting to the kitchen. We were a mad slicing, dicing, mixing, stirring and frying team! We got dinner ready and several batches of cookies in the oven in less than an hour. The Chili was nothing compared to the one that my dad makes – but we couldn’t find a lot of those ingredients – plus we didn’t have all day to stew in on the stove :) It was however quite hearty and went over well with the rest of the family. The cookies were probably the highlight though. Everyone loved them, and who could resist warm, gooey, freshly baked chocolate-covered peanut and pecan cookies! Even Phillipa, who is rather allergic to peanuts had to try them out and carefully eat a few!

Sarah and I spent the rest of the night – her last before leaving – playing cards and chatting over a nice chilled bottle of South African wine. It was a lot of fun and it really made think of all of the good times that I would miss without any of my friends from back home. Sarah represented the end of a line of people from back home that had come to Maun to visit. Once she left, I would be the only one I knew in Southern Africa – besides the locals of course! It couldn’t have ended on a better note.